The incidence and frequency of mental health care has grown to such an extent that mental health care costs now exceed 30 billion dollars annually. While technologies have been developed in other areas of health care to help meet the growing needs for cost-containment and quality control, no technology presently exists which is capable of meeting the growing demands for cost-containment and quality control in the growing mental health care field and industry. In particular, no technology presently exists which utilizes and relies upon a method and an apparatus for the systematic acquisition of objective psychological and/or psychopathological data and/or other pertinent information which utilizes the logical and statistical analysis of such data in order to measure and operationally define the nature and severity of an individual's psychological state and/or state of dysfunction so as to produce output data which can be utilized to indicate and to prescribe the most cost-effective and optimum quality treatment methods, techniques, approaches, programs, and/or facilities available for the treatment of an individual's psychological illness or state of dysfunction. Further, no technology exists which also provides a means by which to monitor the progress, process and outcome of these psychological treatments.
In the prior art, psychological tests are known such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) test, and the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF). While these known prior art tests objectively determine the personality types and traits of an individual, they fail to provide a means by which to measure the specific psychological information which may be utilized in order to objectively determine treatment planning, progress, outcome, cost effectiveness, and/or quality control.
In the prior art publications, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R), published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), developed by the World Health Organization, the descriptions of symptoms are divided into diagnostic categories. These publications, however, have been widely criticized for being fraught with vague and/or arbitrary diagnostic criteria which tend to have little relevance to treatment planning or to the measurement of treatment progress, process or outcomes.
Automated treatment plan generators such as TPWrite, published by Reason House, LTD., are also known from the prior art, which utilize data such as that obtained from the above described DSM-III-R publication schemes in order to determine diagnosis, treatment type, treatment goals and estimated duration of treatment, which data and criteria are subjectively determined by the mental health care health care professional, practitioner and or facility (i.e., the psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, psychiatric nurse, counselor, psychiatric hospital, mental health clinic, substance abuse program, etc.), hereinafter designated the "provider", in order to generate and/or to produce results in the form of computer-generated reports. These automated treatment plan generators, however, lack the scientific data, and the means by which to provide the statistical analysis of such data, which is necessary in order to measure and operationally define the nature and severity of an individual's psychological state and/or state of dysfunction. Further, these known automated treatment plan generators do not provide for the generation of reports which determine the optimum and the most cost-effective treatment methods, techniques, approaches, programs, and/or facilities available to the assessed individual. Further, the treatment generators do not provide for the monitoring of the progress, process and outcome of these treatment methods, techniques, approaches, programs, and/or facilities.
Various other mental health care publications are also known from the prior art which describe psychological treatment alternatives for treating a multitude of psychological disorders. These publications, however, have oftentimes been found to provide contradictory information with regards to treatment options which result from the lack of, or absence of, a sufficient amount of valid, coordinated and integrated mental health care treatment outcome and treatment process research upon which to base conclusions.
The above described shortfalls in the prior art result from the absence of a method and an apparatus, in the mental health care field, which may be utilized consistently and efficiently in the acquisition, accumulation, analysis and application of psychological and/or psychopathological data and/or other pertinent information along with the treatment outcome and process data which relates thereto. The present invention provides a method and an apparatus which serve to overcome the shortfalls of the prior art.